I'm usually eager to jump on board with recommendations from Stoyan’s performance calendar, but Anne’s description of baseline loading doesn't comport with my experience in Webkit browsers (and possibly others). They don't "display instantly after file download", but display almost line by line as the file is downloading, with a partial image appearing from top to bottom as information becomes available. Since this particular trick is about perception -- users being given some visual indication that that the image is loading, and data as soon as possible -- the difference between progressive and baseline loading seems like it should be subtler than the article suggests.

I never said baseline jpegs display instantly after file download. They render as I describe several times, top to bottom or "chop chop chop." It's progressive jpegs that display instantly after file download IF the browser does not support progressive rendering of progressive jpegs.

The difference between the rendering of the two file types is not subtle.

Might I suggest Python instead? It's more immediately useful to kids interested in the sciences.

Let's do both.

"Older browsers" means those that predate native JSON methods. Libraries often use eval() as a fallback.

Irrelevant to your point, but motion interpolation isn't entirely worthless -- it helps, for example, with the motion judder problem that frequently occurs during camera pans on LED-lit TV’s. My new TV offers a clear-frame alternative that mimics the rapid blinking of CRT’s by injecting black frames or lines, which I prefer over motion interpolation, but it significantly reduces brightness and gives some people headaches.

I recently bought a new TV, and out of excitement left it uncalibrated. First film we watched was live action, which I don't watch much of, and it looked fine to me. The second film was anime, which I watch a lot, and I could tell that something was wrong: characters seemed to morph rather than move, like a bad Flash animation, and quick movements like mouths during speech seemed to lack their usual snappiness. It was only then that I started futzing with calibration settings and realized interpolation was a default. While researching afterwards, I found that people watch more live action than cartoons have a very different experience -- when cartoons were mentioned, it was often to say that motion interpolation looks fine to them there but bothers them when watching live action.

Perhaps obvious, but opinion of both 48 vs 24 FPS and motion interpolation seems to have a lot to do with expectations we’ve built from watching previous films (e.g., I watch so little live action that I was oblivious to the frame rate change there). I feel like that’s something people overlook (even in this thread) when they talk about these issues; 24 FPS isn’t better per se, it’s just that if you watch enough stuff intended to be played at about that frame rate, anything significantly higher starts to look wrong.

(Irrelevantly, a cool anecdote about motion blur: it’s what led Spielberg to prefer CGI dinosaurs over stop-motion techniques for Jurassic Park. Although animators were producing some fantastic dinosaur models, the lack of motion blur still left them feeling unnatural and out-of-place on film.)

Or the "someone" GuiA recalls was Mitch Kapor.

That's true when the risks outweigh the benefits, but it's not always true otherwise: we vaccinate everyone against smallpox to -keep- it rare!

Unfortunately, the cost of removing this sort of security theater as a deterrent is invisible and hypothetical, whereas the benefits are obvious.

Dropbox isn't a software product; it's a service. What's more, it's a service that needs to be priced to compete with Apple's own iCloud.

I haven't looked at Aperture or Lightroom, but iWork's price change isn't quite as dramatic or inscrutable as you think: the retail package was $80, and the 3 App store components are $20 each. Apple likely lowered the price as an incentive to push users into its App store, where it gets a cut from every piece of software sold. Dividing the components and selling them individually probably brought in quite a few new users such as myself who didn't want to pay $80 for the full iWork package since it's only Keynote I'm interested in.

Services are more deeply and negatively affected by price changes than software, though. A price change that seems insignificant to you can drive many users away. Look at the fiasco with Netflix last year; they changed their prices by about $6 and subsequently lost about a million subscribers within a few months. Some users see price increases as an indication of a service's instability in the marketplace (and therefore a cue to jump-ship). Most users have lower tolerance thresholds for price differences when comparing services than they do when comparing one-time purchases (like software).

Regardless, now would be a really bad time for Dropbox to increase their pricing. Many Mac & iPhone users are watching iCloud closely and realizing that it could make Dropbox redundant for them. A price increase, even one as small as a ~$30 a year change for their 50+ plan (corollary to your $3 a month change), could push enough users away from the service that Dropbox is better off sticking to its guns.

I agree, but in the case of bad Kindle conversions, the only thing Amazon can fairly be faulted for is requiring users to accompany their reviews with ratings. It's up to the publisher to perform the conversion.

Whenever I have a complaint about a Kindle conversion (twice in two years), I try to rate the book based on the author's work -- the text itself -- but make the review title something like "Do not buy for Kindle", but I can see why reviewers might choose to do otherwise: it is, after all, the publisher's product and the publisher's fault for producing a sloppy "printing".

They're called public schools in England because free and tax-funded education is a relatively new phenomenon. At a time when people could choose between private tuition at home and religious tuition in classrooms, public schools offered a classroom education to any fee-paying member of the public, regardless of creed.